A new front opens

A new front in the ongoing battle being waged by a group of misguided (and foreign-funded) non-government organizations against the banana-exporting industry has opened in the Supreme Court. Last week, the mostly Davao-based NGOs staged a rally in front of the tribunal to dramatize their demand to ban the decades-long practice of aerial spraying of fungicides.

The so-called “intervenors” earlier lost their case before the Court of Appeals, which invalidated a Davao City ordinance which imposed the ban. The appellate court found that the 2007 local law violated the Constitution because it was an unreasonable exercise of the local government’s police power and was tantamount to confiscation of private property, among other things.

The legality of Davao City Ordinance 0309-07, entitled “An ordinance banning Aerial Spraying as an Agricultural Practice in All agricultural Activities by All Agricultural Entities in Davao City” had been upheld by a local court. But the banana industry elevated the matter to the higher court, which ruled against the city and the NGOs.

Taking their usual scare tactics to the Supreme Court, the NGOs paraded weighing scales with bunches of Cavendish bananas on one side and images of people on the other to drive home their point that aerial spraying was poisoning the environment and the people wherever plantations are located. Of course, the show was all for the benefit of the media, since the basis for these claims are tenuous, at the most.

The legality of the Davao City ban, after all, is what the high court will consider, just like the lower courts before it passed judgment upon. As for the supposed threats to public health and the environment posed by the practice, these are all based on an all-but-discredited study conducted three years ago by a team of University of the Philippines-Manila researchers with close ties to the same anti-spraying NGOs.

The same study has been declared inconclusive by a UP-Manila peer review, which cast serious doubts on both the data-gathering methods of the researchers and the conclusions that they arrived at using the questionable processes on which these were based. The fact that the NGOs and their ilk continue to harp on the suspicious study in their various tours of schools and churches (and now, before the high court) should give any impartial observer pause.

The inordinate persistence of the NGO campaigners is understandable when one realizes that their income derives from denigrating a profitable and job-providing industry before their foreign funders, whom they have convinced to support them based on specious science, a slew of fake victims, lawsuits and manufactured media events. It is a lucrative enterprise for these pseudo-advocates of public health and the environment, and the flow of money from bleeding-heart foreign funders could stop if they didn’t generate media noise.

Anyone who has observed closely how these NGO operators work knows this to be true. Unfortunately for these shakedown artists, the people who work in the banana industry aren’t about to back down—especially since they know that they haven’t been doing what the NGOs are accusing them of having done.

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While the anti-spraying NGOs in Davao have their foreign funding sources, the banana-exporting industry doesn’t even get any kind of support from the Philippine government—yet the mostly small-scale planters who make up the backbone of the industry have thrived for decades. And in times of real need, like during the recent onslaught of destructive typhoons in Luzon, the banana growers were even able to lend a helping hand to their less fortunate fellow Filipinos.

Davao’s banana growers quickly responded to calls to send food and other forms of aid to typhoon victims be sending two shipments of nutritious, export-quality bananas for victims of the flooding caused by storm Ondoy in Metro Manila and nearby provinces. total of 7,500 boxes of bananas were sent in shipments of eight 20-footer container vans and 14 10-footer vans to the Social Welfare Department for repacking and distribution to typhoon victims.

At 10 kilograms a box, the two shipments add up to about 75 tons of bananas sent to people left homeless and stranded in evacuation centers by the Tagum Agricultural Development Company Inc., Sumifru, Lapanday Foods, F.S. Dizon and Sons, AM Soriano, Marsman-Drysdale and Unifrutti through their organization Pilipino Banana Growers and Exporters Association.

The bananas were a welcome change from the usual relief goods being packed and sent to evacuation centers, where many victims supposedly had instant noodles coming out of their ears.

Even relief workers benefited from the shipments of the energy-boosting fruit as aid. Bananas consist mainly of sugars and fiber, which makes them ideal for an immediate and prolonged source of energy, as most athletes already know.

The DSWD said it distributed the bananas as follows: two 20-footer and five 10-footer vans in the National Capital Region; two 20-footer vans in Pangasinan; three 20-footer and six 10-footer vans in Region 4-A; three 10-footer vans in Region 3; and one 20-footer van to various other evacuation centers. The fresh green bananas were shipped last week for free on board vessels owned by Solid Shipping and Aboitiz Shipping.

There were no reports of people being poisoned by the bananas, as they probably would have been if the fruits were saturated in dangerous chemicals as the Davao NGOs claim. Then again, no one has ever complained about poisoning after eating in-demand Philippine-grown bananas or even in the plantations where they are grown before the NGOs came along with a great idea to scam foreign funding agencies.

And no one has heard about the anti-spraying NGOs giving anything to the flood victims, either. They were probably too busy holding rallies and photographing themselves while at it, to get some more money from their clueless donors. –Daily Tribune